IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v22y1986i3p351-360.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effect of scale on cost projections for a primary health care program in a developing country

Author

Listed:
  • Over, Mead

Abstract

Accurate estimation of the recurrent costs of primary health care (PHC) activities is essential in light of the need for governments to assess whether and how these costs can be financed. This paper argues that expansion of the PHC activities will result in diseconomies of scale that are not captured by constant average cost projections of recurrent costs. An alternative estimation method which captures the effect of rising average unit costs is proposed with application of this method to data from the Republic of Niger. Results of the analysis show that the 'r-coefficient' (ratio of investment to recurrent costs) for PHC activities can double and costs can be 3 times larger after 12 years.

Suggested Citation

  • Over, Mead, 1986. "The effect of scale on cost projections for a primary health care program in a developing country," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 351-360, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:22:y:1986:i:3:p:351-360
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(86)90134-6
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Johns, Benjamin & Steinhardt, Laura & Walker, Damian G. & Peters, David H. & Bishai, David, 2013. "Horizontal equity and efficiency at primary health care facilities in rural Afghanistan: A seemingly unrelated regression approach," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 25-31.
    2. Vassall, Anna & Compernolle, Phil, 2006. "Estimating the resource needs of scaling-up HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis interventions in sub-Saharan Africa: A systematic review for national policy makers and planners," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 79(1), pages 1-15, November.
    3. Benjamin Johns & Rob Baltussen, 2004. "Accounting for the cost of scaling‐up health interventions," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 13(11), pages 1117-1124, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:22:y:1986:i:3:p:351-360. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.